GÁBOR TOMPA

Director

Collaborator

Personal data

Gábor Tompa (born August 8, 1957) is a Hungarian director from Romania, laureate of numerous awards (four times Best Director of the Year in Romania, Best Foreign Show of the Year in the UK, etc.), and has received widespread recognition in Europe for his physically adventurous and conceptually bold productions of classical plays. He directs worldwide, including in France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Austria, Hungary, Ireland, Canada, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Serbia. He received the UNITER Award for Excellence in 2002 for his numerous career achievements. He is currently the General Director of the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj. Gábor Tompa trained at the Bucharest Academy of Theatre and Film in Romania and began working as a professional director in 1981. Since then, he has directed over 100 productions worldwide, including plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Chekhov, Beckett, Bulgakhov, Büchner, Camus, and Ionesco. In 1990, he was appointed artistic director of the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, Romania, a position he still holds. He was also the head of the directing department at the Târgu Mureș Theatre Academy, Romania, and has been a guest professor at the State University of Cluj, L'Union Theatre Academy, Limoges, Schauspielschule Freiburg, Brunel University, London, Seoul National University, and Institut del Teatre Barcelona. His film "Chinese Defense" won the Best Debut Film Award at the Salerno International Film Festival in Italy in 1999 and was officially selected for the 1999 Berlin Film Festival. Four times Best Director of the Year, he received the award for Best Show of the Year in 2009 for "Three Sisters," and his production "Born for Never" was voted "Critics' Choice #1" at the Avignon Festival in 2009. Tompa is also the author of several volumes of poetry and essays on theatre. Gábor Tompa was the head of the directing department at the University of San Diego from 2007 to 2015 and continues to teach courses on the history of directing and directing, both for graduate students and undergraduates. Since May 2018, he has been the president of the Union of Theatres of Europe. Gábor Tompa is part of the series of author-directors in Romanian theatre who, beyond the value of their stage creation, have the enormous merit of connecting Hungarian and Romanian theatre cultures, fulfilling a directing program based on the belief that "every true work of art rethinks the entire culture and strives to carry it forward."